• The seventh MEMOCODE conference will gather researchers and practitioners who create methods, tools, and architectures for hardware/software systems.
• MEMOCODE 2009 will host the MEMOCODE co-design contest, organized by James Hoe (CMU) and Forest Brewer (UCSB).
• The MEMOCODE 2009 conference will be held from July 13-15, 2009 in Cambridge, MA.

ReConFig 2009 will have a special track on Reconfigurable Computing for Security and Cryptography

• Call for Papers [PDF Flyer]
• Submission Deadline: 7/31
• Conference: 12/9 - 12/11, Cancun, Mexico

Last semester, Zhimin Chen demonstrated an FPGA-based on-chip temperature sensing technique, sensitive enough to detect someone touching the FPGA package, regardless of other effects such as environment temperature. He will do a talk on this design at ISVLSI 2009 ("Increasing the Sensitivity of On-Chip Digital Thermal Sensors with Pre-Filtering").

Sergey Morozov (undergraduate researcher in our group) did a talk at the IEEE Virginia Mountain Section Meeting on a "Standard Hardware Interface for Secure Hardware Hash Algorithms". Presentation Slides. Website will be available soon.

Where to submit your ideas in cryptographic/secure hardware this semester:

• The CHES workshop: Submission 3/16/09, Notification 5/18/09, Workshop 9/7-9/09.
• The IEEE HOST workshop: Submission 4/17/09, Notification 5/22/09, Workshop 7/27/09.

Anand Reddy Balakrishnan and Raghunandan Nagesh graduated from Virginia Tech as MEng. Their research was on designing a True Random Number Generator.
Update 2/09: Abhranil Maiti will present this work at the poster session of GLSVLSI 2009 ("Compact and Scalable PUF-TRNG").

Aske Wiid Brekling, PhD student at the Technical University of Denmark, visited us for a month from 10/22 until 11/22. Aske's research topic is on semantics modeling. He has developed a semantics model for GEZEL.

A picture of Aske with the complete secure embedded systems group in Fall 2008. From left to right: Anand, Aske, Zhimin, Abhranil, Raghu, Christian, Eric, Patrick, Sergey, Mike. We are getting closer to cover all continents.